


Lord Have Mercy

by clytemnestras



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Other, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-19
Updated: 2015-11-19
Packaged: 2018-05-02 10:20:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5244704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> father, she has cleansed me with those hands and those eyes, I do not know how to turn unless it is towards her, I do not know where to go except in her direction.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lord Have Mercy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kwritten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/gifts).



It's her secret superpower, under a mask that's a perfect replica of her own face. She listens, and things are heard.  
  
She hears that she is the most important thing in the universe, and she believes it (and she's right). She hears that she blew in on the wind and with tiny wings like autumn leaves and she loved and was loved and she lost and got herself lost again.  
  
Clara hears from lost of places that she's impossible.  
  
It first comes from her mother when she won't put down the storybook and it slips under bathwater and Robin Hood gurgles his last breaths from between bubbles. The back pages are still dry, Marian salvaged from the sinking ship.  
  
Impossible and contrary and the smartest silly little girl on earth.  
  
She learns later that's the one she should be sorry for, after. (and she still isn't.)  
  
It comes next from her teacher, stern and spilling out of her pencil skirt in rolls and creases of fat and bitterness. She is impossible because she doesn't believe in anything. Not angels or God or hell.  
  
(This is wrong, though. Clara does believe in things. Clara believes in miracles and love and she believes in herself above anything and when she mentions this to the woman with lipstick stains on her snaggle-tooth she learns to believe that no good deed goes unpunished.)  
  
It keeps coming, again and again. Clara Oswald, you impossible girl. Always right, always smug, always, always, always.  
  
It doesn't mean anything until He says it, but then most things don't.  
  
(even then, it means the wrong thing, but it never felt like it at the time)  
  
And then she hears something impossible, and it isn't her name.  
  
Because Clara always listens, she listens to the things she isn't supposed to hear. And she didn't hear choirs of angels when children bowed their heads in prayer, and she didn't hear the truth of the Lord when the now-disgraced Priest dropped bread into a cup, and then one day she did hear divinity in the centre of the universe, sitting on the pavement outside her door.  
  
She heard soft sounds like beating wings or beating hearts and gasping breaths.  
  
She knows that one angel has blue blue eyes and doesn't need wings to fly, and her kisses aren't chaste at all. Clara hears a voice under the mechanics of a madman's box and He isn't the one who steals her away.  
  
She is.  
  
There's a soul in a machine and it's a girl and sometimes when no ears are listening, she has arms and legs and she takes things away. She takes away kisses from Clara's lips and she takes the soft whiteness from Clara's thighs and covers them in bruises that blossom into blue and she takes the earth out from under Clara's feet and takes her to places that she'd never believe in.  
  
And they talk, and Clara listens, and she hears.  
  
  



End file.
